Page 23

CHAPTER 22

August 22 nd

7:50 AM

I’ M PARKED DOWN the street from the high school in Carey Gap, hoping my presence does not look as sinister as it feels. Colorful backpacks stream past. Piping laughter takes flight on the wind. A gang of teenage girls, the scariest creatures of all, are clustered a few feet away from me, passing a vape around their circle. Smoke plumes above their heads as if from tiny chimneys.

The silver sedan I’ve been waiting for barrels around the corner. Karishma emerges from the passenger seat before the wheels have stopped moving. She snakes a crossbody bag over her shoulder and waves a shy goodbye to her dad. I watch his car pass mine. I count to three.

I pounce.

Karishma’s dawdling pace means I barely break a sweat to intercept her at the flagpole. When she hears me calling her name, she turns away from the nearby gaggle with carmine red cheeks. She lowers her head as she shuffles toward me, as if her acknowledgement of my presence poses an existential threat to her social status.

She tucks her arms beneath her ribs and rocks on her heels. “Is it even legal for you to be here?”

“I need to talk to you about Grace.”

“Okay, well …” Karishma gestures to the locker hallway, where students bottleneck at the doors in their rush for first period. “I have physics in, like, six minutes.”

“What would it take to convince you to get in my car?”

“You’re insane.”

Insane? No. Hell-bent. But they look so much alike. The warning bell shrieks. The bottleneck at the locker hall vibrates with frenzy, everyone jostling their way toward the double doors. Six minutes has become five will become four will become a missed opportunity, gone up in smoke.

“Karishma, Grace needs you. If you love her at all—and I know you do—you’ll help me help her. Tell me what it would take to get you to come with me.”

Her frantic eyes dart like dragonflies, from the sidewalk to the students’ bottleneck and then to the weather-worn American flag atop the flagpole, before finally settling on me. She chews the inside of her cheeks for a long time before she finally speaks.

Karishma’s conditions are simple: one hundred dollars and a cheeseburger with extra tomatoes. She reminds me about the extra tomatoes several times. When she unwraps the burger from its greasy paper, she expresses disappointment at only having five tomato slices. She extracts one from between meat patties and places it on her tongue like a sacramental wafer.

As we pull into the empty nature preserve parking lot, she shifts in her seat and chuckles nervously. “You swear you’re not murdering me, right?”

If I was planning to skin her and wear her flesh as an overcoat, I might just get away with it all the way out here, where no one would hear her scream. The preserve promises no breathtaking natural beauty, only a few crudely maintained trails cutting through the brown sandhills. Informational signs advise of the local flora and fauna. We park closest to one showcasing a blown-up picture of a tarantula, the hairy abomination cradled in a woman’s palm to prove even hideous creatures are worthy of love.

She mistakes my silence for sulking. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, with your mom and all. I’m being insensitive.”

“I have thick skin.”

“I know you came by my house last night. My dad was really weirded out.”

“What’d he say?”

“Nothing. He’s—well, you don’t know him that well. My dad isn’t great with people, especially strangers.”

Especially Byrds. I roll down my window for reprieve from the greasy air. “Did you buy Grace any vapes?”

Karishma removes another tomato slice from her burger, folds it in half, and sucks it into her mouth like a spaghetti noodle. “Why are you asking? It’s just a vape.”

“I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble. I’m not buddy-buddy with the cops.”

“I’m eighteen. She’s not. I’ve bought her a couple.”

“Did she lose one recently?”

It’s too on the nose. Karishma’s alarms have been raised, but she is not quite wily enough to sell me the necessary lie. “I don’t think so.” She plays it too cool. Like every teenage girl, she thinks she’s a good liar, and maybe she is about trivial things, finishing a homework assignment or coming home after curfew. But she has never lied about anything with real stakes. I think back to when our paths crossed at the church. If she had lied to her father about the joyriding or simply pretended it didn’t happen, she wouldn’t have been there. That tells me she isn’t good under pressure. It’s a matter of finding the right buttons to press.

“I think you know something about my mother,” I say.

“No.”

“I think Grace told you what happened.”

She wants her laugh to sound incredulous, but I only hear jangling nerves. “This is weird, Providence.”

I don’t like this. I don’t relish the opportunity to intimidate a teenager. It’s like I’m back in prison, preying on a weaker inmate to preserve my rank in the hierarchy, feeding the sadistic streak I wish I didn’t have. “Grace waited to report our mother missing because she killed her. Harmony didn’t know where the car was because she didn’t drive it. Grace did. Grace ran over our mother, and she was too panicked to realize she left her vape in the car when she abandoned it, and I think you, me, and her are the only three people alive who know this.”

When she lifts her eyes, their strength surprises me. She holds my stare unblinking. “What you think happened didn’t happen.”

“Then tell me what did.”

“I can’t.”

“Bullshit. There’s no reason you can’t tell me.”

She discards her burger carcass into the paper bag between her feet. She pushes it as far from her as possible, like the mere sight will make her vomit. “What you think happened,” she begins, enunciating every word, “didn’t happen.”

“You were there. That’s why you won’t say anything.”

It’s a bluff. I don’t think she had anything to do with it—or at least, that’s what I think until she turns away. I have the fleeting thought that I should lock the car doors to keep her from bolting off into the sandhills, but then she’ll really think I’m going to hurt her.

I am walking blindfolded through a maze, looking for answers about my mother, and every turn I take brings me closer to disaster than peace.

“What is it worth to you?” she asks.

“What’s it worth to me?”

“My dad has a lot of medical bills from when your dad shot him.” She wrings her hands. “I’m tired of watching him buy groceries with spare change.”

“You’d rat Grace out to me for money?”

Karishma rakes a hand through her bangs. Her fingers snag on a tangle, but she yanks them through anyway, the follicles ripping from her scalp like Velcro. “I’m telling you what you want to know, aren’t I?”

I want to warn Grace that her best friend may not be who she thinks she is. Her best friend’s loyalty has a price. In a less dire situation, this would be a teachable moment, a lesson for a teenage girl experiencing her first real betrayal. But is it a betrayal to put flesh and blood over her friend? Is it a betrayal to love your parent so much? No. I wish I was so devoted to my father. Such dedication is exactly what nature intends. Honor thy mother. Honor thy father.

“How about a grand?” I ask.

I know from the way her eyes pop she would have taken a couple hundred, but if her intention truly is to make a dent in Mitesh’s medical bills, giving her less seems insulting—and if she’s fleecing me, so be it. There are nobler hills to die on.

I take the money from my purse to prove I’m good for it. “Tell me and it’s yours.”

She stares into her lap, willing herself to find the courage to speak. “We took Harmony’s car. Stole it, technically, I guess.”

“Why?”

“There’s an abortion clinic in Casper. It’s the closest one.”

“For you or for her?”

“For Grace.” Karishma is relieved that I didn’t clutch my pearls and launch into a moralizing screed. She loosens up the tiniest bit. “But you can’t—”

“I would never tell. I swear on my life, Karishma.”

Her face darkens with shame when she looks at the money again. “It was a whole ordeal to get out there. And I mean—she was too scared to even look up clinics. I did it for her. She was scared of your dad, but I was scared of the government. I worried I’d wake up and find out abortion was suddenly illegal and we’d be hauled off to … well, you know. York. I figured we’d have to go to Denver or Omaha, but the one in Casper was new, and we could get there and back in a day.”

“So you stole the car.”

Her story is breathless. “First she got a fake ID so she could say she was over eighteen—don’t ask me how she got that or the money—and then yeah, we stole the car. Harmony knew it was us. We’ve done it before because we know where she keeps her keys. It was the day your mom went missing. We ditched school and told our dads we were hanging out together after, and then we drove to Wyoming. The procedure was outpatient, really fast, but on the way back, I hit a deer. It was … God, it was awful, the sound.” Karishma forces the words through clenched teeth. She is remembering every noise the animal made. “But the point is, we damaged the front of the car. So when we brought the car back that night, it had a big dent, one might say a human-sized dent, and Harmony must have thought … She never asked. She never asked. She dumped the car. If Grace knew she was going to confess, she would have told Harmony where we were. I know she would have. She would have stopped it before it went this far.”

“Harmony wanted to protect Grace,” I say, more to myself than to her. Honor thy sister.

“Harmony never could keep a secret.” She relegates Harmony to the past tense with ease, the way you write out a minor character who has ceased to be relevant to the story. “She got drunk once and told your dad about Grace’s boyfriend. He was so angry that—”

“Don’t finish your sentence.”

“Grace insisted on not telling Harmony,” Karishma says. “She didn’t trust her to keep it a secret.”

“And if my dad found out, he’d hurt her.”

“That’s why I never said anything, not until right now.”

“The police never questioned Grace’s alibi?”

“I was her alibi,” she says. “I said she was with me.”

“Harmony is going to prison for a very long time for something she didn’t do.”

Karishma pinches her nose until the skin blanches white. “We didn’t make her confess! She’s the one who made the decision! The lie is too big now. There’s no undoing it.”

The ultimate act of selflessness collides with the ultimate act of selfishness. Harmony falls on her sword, and with her own neck on the line, Grace lets her. She is a liar, but she is no murderer. What Karishma said is true. The lie is too big. A house of cards. Move one and the rest will fall. Grace and Karishma are both guilty of very real crimes—obstruction at the very least, more for Grace with the fake ID, even more depending on how she got the money. With the local attention my mother’s death has brought, they would certainly go to jail, maybe prison. And all of this is to say nothing about my father’s wrath. He would hurt her if he found out she had an abortion. I believe it in my soul. I think he would even kill her.

I hand her the money. “So if Harmony didn’t do it, and you and Grace didn’t do it, who did?”

“I have no clue,” she whispers. “I—I think it was just a random act of violence and now we’ve all made a fucking mess of it.”

“And you swear you don’t know where she got the money?”

“All she said was her sister had friends in high places. I didn’t ask how Harmony knew anyone in high places.”

Karishma has the wrong sister. Harmony does not have well-connected friends, but I do. I have one in particular.

Zoe commands a legion of interns and assistants, most of them women, all of them white. They have converted the old auto insurance office on the main street in Carey Gap into a campaign headquarters humming with too much life to be stuck in mid-nowhere Nebraska. They peck dutifully at their keyboards and field phone calls with aplomb, half-eaten lunches left to shrivel on desks so visitors understand how busy they are. It appears all of them are obligated to have a red ZOE MARKHAM FOR CONGRESS sign affixed to their cubicle.

“It’s reelection season,” Zoe explains as she closes her office door behind me. One window looks out at the sea of cubicles, the other into the parking lot they share with a hardware store. “It’s not usually this busy, which—and I don’t mean to be rude, really—means I don’t have a lot of time to talk. And if it’s about last night, I—”

“It isn’t.”

She softens at this. We sit on the cracked leather couch, facing each other but not quite touching. I want to savor the moment, her closeness, because I have the nagging feeling this is the last time we will speak, but I’ve come here on a mission. All I need is an answer, and then I can go. “Why did you help Grace?”

“Help her with what?”

“Zoe, please don’t. I already know.”

Her smile wobbles. “No, really. What are you talking about?”

I hesitate to use the exact words in case anyone is listening in, if her office is somehow under surveillance. “I don’t care that you did it. I just have to know why. For myself.”

Zoe gets up and stands before the map of Nebraska hanging on her wall. Every county is shaded a different color, but Tillman County has the distinction of being encircled by a heart. “If I did do something, it would be because I wanted her to have an adult in her life she could trust,” she says, her back to me, her expression hidden. “It would be because I saw how much you needed that adult in your life when you were her age. Maybe if you had someone, things would have turned out differently.”

“I had that adult,” I say. “I had Gil.”

“But I think you needed more. Someone you could really talk to and confide in, not just a respite away from home.”

“I didn’t think you knew Grace so well.”

She finally faces me to pull the blinds looking out into the office shut. She is as impassive as ever. “I don’t, but she— if she came to me, because I’m not saying anything happened, it would be because she needed me, and I had the means to help.”

“Did she tell you what she was using the money for?”

She nods, then continues like she has read my mind. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about someone else’s abortion. She wanted one. I didn’t need her to tell me more than that. She knew exactly how her life was going to play out if she didn’t have one.” She pauses. “She’s like you, actually. She doesn’t want kids at all. She started going on about it, and I thought about you saying the same thing to me at her age.”

“Birds of a feather.”

“You can cry, Providence.” Her voice is silky, notes plucked from a harp.

“I don’t want to cry anymore.”

“But you can, if you need to.” She sits beside me again and offers her shoulder, but I don’t take it. I’m so tired of crying.

We don’t say anything for a long time. I hear the phones ringing outside of the office, the staff’s chatter seeping through the walls. My world has crumbled, yet life carries on for everybody else. I resent the normalcy of their lives and how they can speak their traumas aloud. You can talk about a divorce. You can talk about a cheating spouse. You can talk about the death of a loved one. You can talk about the bank foreclosing on your house. But I cannot talk about what I know, and I am condemned to bear this secret forever. The only person other than myself who will ever know the full story is Grace, and now I am bound to her, more hopelessly entangled with her than I will ever be with my mother. I am furious with Grace for making this mess and dragging so many people into her web, for leaving me to piece it all together, and yet I still want to hold her in my arms and comfort her because none of it was intentional. It was a single flame that grew into a roaring wildfire.

“I want to kiss you.” Zoe’s fingertips are icy against my jaw, her mouth parted in invitation. The soft light turns both of her eyes green.

“No,” I murmur.

“The door’s locked. A couple more minutes won’t—”

“I have to let you go, Zoe. This isn’t fair to either of us.”

Her wounded expression startles me. “I know I mean a lot to you,” she says. “That’s why I’m saying you can.”

“You do mean a lot to me, but I don’t mean a lot to you anymore, and that’s okay. Part of me can’t let go of what life would be like if I hadn’t gone to prison. I picture you in that life. I picture us happy, in a big house on a lake, like we always talked about. You’d teach me how to swim. We would sit on the porch and drink lemonade. We’d have a few chickens and ducks. Do you remember?”

“Oh, Providence …”

“I want us to be happy. I wish it could be with each other, but it can’t. I have to learn to be okay with it.”

Her hand slides further up my cheek and I cannot help curling into it. Her lotion smells like honey. “You’ll be happy. You’re too stubborn to not end up happy.”

I kiss her on the cheek, and then I leave, lighter and heavier at the same time.